One Teen Dead, One Jailed Over Boy

Saturday

Apr 18, 2009 at 7:43 AM

PINELLAS PARK | Her teenage daughter died in the street, she said, less than a half-mile from their home, stabbed in the heart, her blood pooling beside the green minivan.

"She was out with friends. Coming home. I was waiting up for her, just after midnight, when the phone rang," Gay Ludemann said Friday. Ludemann was so close to the crime scene, she got there while paramedics were trying to save her daughter.

Two days after Sarah Rose Ludemann, 18, was killed in what police describe as a teenage "love hexagon," Ludemann's mother was struggling to accept that her only child is gone.

She also was trying to plan Sarah's funeral, which is today.

"She was a good girl. A loving girl. My heart is breaking," Ludemann said. "She loved going to the movies, bowling and the beach. She was making straight A's, going to college next year, going to become a nurse."

Sarah was looking forward to going to her senior prom at Pinellas Park High with Joshua Camacho, 19. "They had been together more than a year," Ludemann said. "He was her first boyfriend, her one and only love."

Unemployed, say police reports. "A player," girls told cops. He got a girl pregnant, was dating Sarah before the baby was born, then two-timed on them both — and admitted it.

"My heart goes out to him right now," Ludemann said. She paused.

"But I know he was a big part of the reason Sarah was killed."

• • •

Ludemann didn't know her daughter was going to stop by that house that night.

But this girl, Rachel Marie Wade, had been texting threats to Sarah all day, Camacho told police. The girls had been fighting over him for more than a year, along with the mother of his baby.

Their feud played out in the typical teenage spots: outside a movie theater, in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, at the pizza place where one of them worked. It started with Silly String, escalated to shoving; punches were thrown, car mirrors kicked off. Insults and accusations shot through cyberspace.

So late Tuesday, when Sarah heard that Rachel was hanging with a friend just a few blocks away, she piled two other people into her parents' van and drove to the house on 52nd Street N.

Rachel met her at the driver's side door, witnesses say, with a kitchen knife.

Now, a pretty blond high school scholar is dead.

And a pretty, blond Applebee's waitress — only a year older — waits in the county jail, under $500,000 bail, facing charges of second-degree murder.

Because of a boy.

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